American writer Alvin Toffler coined the term “future shock” for the feeling that one’s environment is changing faster than one’s ability to acclimatise, although I first became familiar with it in 1977 through that excellent educational publication 2000AD comic. This week, Evan Davis’s Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest (iPlayer) suggested the entire capital may now be suffering future shock.

Normally when I hear about my city’s economic or social supremacy over the rest of the country I get a childish urge to punch the air and shout: “YES! IN YOUR FACE, LEEDS!” But the facts and figures here were vertigo-inducing. London generates a fifth of the country’s income and is 44.3 per cent more productive than the national average. A thousand extra people are born or arrive in the capital every week.

Davis looked at the vast London Gateway container port reclaimed from the sea, so new it doesn’t show up on satnav, and Crossrail, which hasn’t opened yet but is already inadequate. He examined a £39.5 million Mayfair house that could have had a taxi meter clocking up its minute-by-minute cost-appreciation, and learned that 135 high-end restaurants opened last year. But only 75 closed. Whaaaat? (Jaw drops. Brain explodes.)

If this ratio continues, within 20 years Zones 1-4 will comprise only tiny hutches for squillionaires and mono-product restaurants with seven Michelin stars and standing room only for six patrons. How is this sustainable?

Most chilling of all was the story of Elephant & Castle. I bought my first flat there 21 years ago, jointly with my sister, a four-bedroom maisonette for £69,000, cheap (-ish) because it was near the monolithic Aylesbury and Heygate council estates and 20 minutes’ walk from the Zone 2 Tube (we sold it four years later, two recessions ago, for the same sum). Now, 1,000 households have been cleared out of the Heygate itself to make way for hugely expensive housing. Of the 120 private tenants who lived there, only half could afford to stay in London, and only 35 of those could afford to stay in Southwark. That’s just the private tenants, remember. London is being economically cleansed.

After this, 37 Days (iPlayer), Mark Hayhurst’s drama about the time lag between the death of Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of the First World War, was almost calming. Methodical, meticulous, it showed us the views of clerks as well as the diplomats who thought themselves gentlemen and were, on many occasions, also cousins.

Finally: you know that TV archetype of the chaotic, philandering drunk who is also a brilliant lawyer/detective/writer? Well, the latest one is attorney Keegan Deane: he’s played with snappy wastrel charm by Greg Kinnear in a show called Rake on the Universal Channel, which can be seen and guiltily enjoyed on Sky Go and Virgin Anywhere.

Serial box

So we learned a bit more this week about the factors that made Matthew McConaughey’s Cohle such a stone-cold wackadoodle, and also a bit more about the morals and the marriage of Woody Harrelson’s Hart in True Detective (Sky On Demand). The plot about murdered girls inches forwards, but it’s not about the plot, is it?

Line of Duty (iPlayer) has almost too much plot but a few strands, including the one involving missing teenager Carly Kirk, twined together in another unbearably tense, complex and compelling episode this week. But like True Detective the main focus here is on the richly textured, deeply flawed characters, prime among them Keeley Hawes’s DI Lindsay Denton, a role that puts all her past work in the shade.

Margaret Thatcher and Ian MacGregor are dead, while Arthur Scargill is at war with the current leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers. So this 30th anniversary documentary features the strikers, “scabs”, policemen and wives involved in the 1984 strike.